Thanks for all your information Greg. I will keep my camera as 3:2 as the results I have achieved when edited to 16:9 look good on the tv. I appreciate your thoughts about taking photos of people etc.
I really don't know why I still get black bars each side of these images on the tv though when I only processed to 16:9. It wasn't until I also altered the pixels to 3840 x 2160 that the images filled the full screen. I used the batch processing method described above, plus I used another piece of software to batch process to 16:9. I will keep experimenting....perhaps I am doing something wrong.
I hope I haven't lost too much by doing these things, but as I said, The photos look find to me.
By @Floff10
You should not worry about quality and I totally agree with Greg.
A few thoughts :
- There is no magic in a 4k display. Only consider that any camera or phone from the last ten years will offer at least that amount of pixels, generally twice more. Compared to your picture files, the TV generally has to 'downsize', often to half of the pixels and lose some potential details. In that case, that loss is irrelevant, you would have to get very close to the TV with a magnifying glass to notice some lack in details. 4k displays are used on big TV, on relatively big (27" photo displays) or on smartphones of a few inches (you need a magnifying glass to see the advantage). Viewing distance is always forgotten in the equation when speaking about resolution. Generally the viewing distance for the TV is 2 or 3 times the width of the display, that's ideal. The general advice for 300 pixels per inch is true for crisp prints on glossy paper of up to the A4 format, viewed at arm length. My 24" inches monitor (1920 x 1200 pix) is viewed at minimum 2 feet. I don't zoom with my seat... I use the zoom tool when needed to avoid stressing my eyes with too short viewing distance. Good if I have enough pixels to work with.
- About aspect ration and 16/9.
It's an excellent thing that your camera can shoot at more than 4k. If you care about perfect framing and image proportions, that gives you room to crop. When I started silver shooting more than 60 years ago, I had a twin-lens camara giving only square formats. All my shots were processed and cropped according to the output paper size... or to best fit the contents of the image. No batch resizing tool does take the contents of the image into account to crop ideally each view.
- Setting your camera to 16/9?
In all my digital cameras and phones, the aspect ratio of the sensor is not 16/9, it's 4/3 or 3/2 and 16/9 is a setting you use to tell the camera to crop the image internally. In all those cases, the raw images, if available, gives you wider view that the internal crop. Technically, there may be cameras using 16/9 ratio sensors. Easy to check: have a look at the file size in kB for each ratio. Generally, 16/9 is smaller than the full sensor size.
- Batch resizing:
As already stated, the new aspect ratio is applied independently from the image contents.
You can use various ways, good external tools or the editor (process multiple files) the organizer (export as new files) or the Elements ACR plugin which allows more flexibility (would need another discussion...), applying a common crop for a batch of files and ajusting separately the best crops for some files.
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